Sunday, 31 March 2013

My
favourite television viewer discovered in the course of writing Armchair Nation
was George Mackay Brown, the reclusive Orcadian poet and writer who rarely left
the islands (or, in fact, his Stromness council flat, except to go to the pub).
When Orkney finally got television from the Meldrum transmitter through a sea
of static in the mid-1950s, he railed against it as a dark avatar of all that
was corrupt about the modern world, but he gradually relented, acquiring a
rented black and white ‘stone age’ set, then a colour one, and finally – in the
1970s and 1980s – becoming a virtual addict. He often used his weekly column in
the Orcadian newpaper to talk about the programmes he had seen.

Watching
Scotland disintegrate in the 1978 world cup in front of a colour TV, he
wondered: ‘Is there something strange and perverse in the Scottish character
that allows the brimming cup to fall and shatter on a stone?’ He became a fan
of the snooker, and marvelled at how a new pair of glasses had transformed
watching the sport: ‘Figures shimmering with vitality, with intent vibrant
faces, were striking balls of amazing solidity and vivid colours’. He also grew
to like the daily quiz show Countdown: ‘Letters is my trade, and so I ought to
be good at the word-making, but my mind goes numb and after a few seconds I
give up … strangely enough, I can do the numbers better.’

He
never missed the science programmes on BBC2. After one Horizon programme,
Hello, Universe!, broadcast in March 1981, he wrote this:

‘An
astonishing thing transpired. Even supposing our message got through to a very
distant planet, its journey there would take 40,000 years. The planet’s reply
would take a further 40,000 years. At the end of that time we of 1981 would
long have been kirkyard dust, and the earth itself perhaps a cinder … Sitting
lonely, late at night, in a council house in Orkney – as one shuts off the TV
and, beyond the window, the innumerable star-systems wheel – one realises that
one is not lonely at all. However isolated, in a croft above the seashore or on
a hillside, we are involved with homo sapiens, we live on a teeming ant-hill of
a planet, between skulls and seeds.’

Brown’s
newspaper column had such a distinctive voice – a mixture of lyricism, naivety,
misanthropy and good-heartedness – that when I finally reached the end of them (the
last appeared just a few weeks before his death in April 1996) it felt like saying
goodbye to a friend.

Tuesday, 19 March 2013

When
I am marking students’ essays, one of the commonest things I write in the
margin is ‘not a sentence’ – which of course is also not a sentence.

I
love sentences. ‘And the words slide into the slots ordained by syntax,’ writes
Anthony Burgess in his novel Enderby Outside, ‘and glitter as with atmospheric
dust with those impurities which we call meaning.’ Sentences are ways of
shaping and reshaping the world, creating little universes of sense and meaningfulness.
A sentence is a beautifully logical system of relationships in which, as
Stanley Fish writes in his book How to Write a Sentence, ‘no word floats
without an anchoring connection within an overall structure’.

In
her book The Writing Life, Annie Dillard tells a story about a fellow writer
who taught creative writing at the same American college as her. She was asked
by a student if she thought he could be a writer. Well, she replied, do you
like sentences? Dillard says that she understood immediately what that meant
(I’m not sure whether the student did): he was being told that ‘if he liked
sentences he could begin’. She recalls a similar conversation with a friend who
is a painter: ‘I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, “I like the
smell of paint.”’ Sentences, in other words, are the raw material of writing –
and if you don’t have a feel for them, you’re like a painter who can’t stand
the smell of paint.

One
of the problems I have with the managerialist language that has pervaded public
institutions, including universities, over the last few years is that it is
surely responsible for some of the ugliest sentences to have been crafted since
the Phoenicians came up with that bright idea called the alphabet about 3000
years ago. These sentences seem to assume that writing is easy and
straightforward – that just by welding together a few abstract nouns, passive
constructions and verbless participles you are communicating with another human
being. I would be tempted to say that this is what the anthropologist Bronislaw
Malinowski called ‘phatic communication’ – communication just for the sake of
it, with no meaningful content. But that’s being too kind. Really it is
anti-communication, a combination of PR, bullshit and arse-covering that exhibits
a profound mistrust of language and, by extension, social life.

Please
don’t tell me that none of this matters and that worrying about the position of
words in a sentence is just being picky. Who was it who said that all poets are
pedants in disguise – or was it that all pedants are poets in disguise? To
paraphrase Kenneth Tynan after he saw Look Back in Anger for the first time,
I’m not sure I could love anyone who didn’t love sentences.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘Management of what?
Management for what? Management. Management. Management. The word sticks in
one’s interface. Please excuse me if I dare to laugh, but I know that each age,
even each decade, has its little cant word coiled up inside real discourse like
a tiny grub in the middle of an apple.’ – Dennis Potter

Sunday, 17 March 2013

Graham
Kemp writes with a correction to ‘The sound of my own voice’, my post of 25
February: ‘It’s true that bone conduction makes your own voice sound deeper
than you sound to others (or to yourself in a recording), but putting your
fingers in your ears blocks air
conduction, and so makes your voice sound even
deeper.’

Of
course, you could always stick with my initial explanation – I did get a B in
my Biology O Level, after all (I think). But since Graham is Professor of
Musculoskeletal Biology at the University of Liverpool, I think I might go with
him. In any case, a few seconds’ self-experiment is enough to prove him right.

Sunday, 10 March 2013

I’m working in the university library at the
moment. Libraries are no longer cathedrals of silence and so the soundtrack to
my work is students talking to each other on their phones. I don't mind any
more and have got used to the noise, mostly filtering it out along with the PA
announcements and that buzzing-bee sound emanating from headphones. But
ohmigod: if Richard Dawkins could hear how much young people say ‘ohmigod’, I
think he would give up trying to convert us all into rational humanists. The
conversations are sometimes fraught: fallings out, insecurities, anxieties,
broken hearts and other mind-forg’d manacles. He said, she said. I guess it could all be
filed under what the poet C.K. Williams called ‘the old heart stamping in its
stall’. A seat of learning, with all the outward signs of institutional
respectability – computer screens, bookcases, photocopiers, quiet study spaces
– is also a repository of invisible, unfulfilled desires. Where do all these
desires go? Maybe they are like radio waves, and when they are spent on this
earth they travel at the speed of light to other galaxies to perplex extraterrestrials
on temperate planets. More likely they are useless and go nowhere, like a horse
stamping in its stall.

‘My
daughter lives in a girls’ web of thrills and tensions invisible to me,’ writes
Kathleen Jamie in her book Sightlines. ‘She frets about who said what to whom,
and who sent what text; sometimes whole days are spent in fallings out and
makings up and social anxiety. I wan’t to say it doesn’t matter. “It does
matter!” says my daughter, and she’s right.’

Yes
she is. I wish I could say to them it gets easier, but we just carry on like
this till we drop, caught in this web of thrills and tensions, caring too much
about what other people said or didn’t say. Although most of us would rather
not talk about this on a phone in the library.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘Every living creature
exists by a routine of some kind; the small rituals of that routine are the
landmarks, the boundaries of security, the reassuring walls that exclude a horror
vacui; thus, in our own species, after some tempest of the spirit in which the
landmarks seem to have been swept away, a man will reach out tentatively in
mental darkness to feel the walls, to assure himself that they will stand where
they stood - a necessary gesture, for the walls are of his own building,
without universal reality, and what man makes he may destroy.’ - Gavin Maxwell,
Ring of Bright Water

Some deluded
people turn to writing as a cure for loneliness, which, as this quote from Rebecca
Solnit suggests, is a bit like banging your head repeatedly against a brick
wall to cure a headache:

‘Writing
is lonely. It’s an intimate talk with the dead, with the unborn, with the
absent, with strangers, with the readers who may never come to be and who, even
if they do read you, will do so weeks, years, decades later. An essay, a book,
is one statement in a long conversation you could call culture or history; you
are answering something or questioning something that may have fallen still
long ago, and the response to your words may come long after you’re gone and
never reach your ears – if anyone hears you in the first place … Writing is a
model for how indirect effect can be, how delayed, how invisible; no one is
more hopeful than a writer, no one is a bigger gambler.’ - Rebecca Solnit, Hope
in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (2004), pp. 64-5

There’s a
book of short stories by Richard Yates whose title I have always loved for its
alliterative loveliness and its strange precision: Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. But
actually, I am with Laing. There is really only one kind of loneliness, the one
that is 'like being hungry ... in a place where being hungry is shameful, and
where one has no money and everyone else is full' and that is 'like mould or
fur, a prophylactic that inhibits contact, no matter how badly contact is
desired'.

Mundane
quote for the day: ‘Nothing can match the loneliness of a pianist in a large
hotel. All around him is just a hum of cocktails and small talk; he is more
alone with his melody than he would be on an island. Yet at a particular
moment, he stops and people applaud. You are doubly astonished: there was an
end to this music then, and people were listening? He was playing something and
he was not playing in vain? He seems stupefied himself. But he well knows, in
the secret depths of his soul, that this applause only breaks out because his
music has fallen silent, a silence these wild things notice in much the same
way they notice the sugar melting in their glasses. So, like the bald prima
donna, he quickly starts up with a new tune.’ - Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories
(1990), p. 223

About Me

I am a writer and academic, based at Liverpool John Moores University. I have written five books, the most recent of which are Queuing for Beginners (2007), a cultural history of daily habits since the war, inspired in part by the Mass-Observation surveys of the 1930s and 1940s, and On Roads: A Hidden History (2009). As well as publishing articles in obscure academic journals, I write for the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Financial Times and other publications. I am a cultural historian focusing on the very recent past, with a particular interest in the everyday. To email me, click on 'view my complete profile' below. You can follow me on Twitter at
twitter.com/joemoransblog